playing at shops

I was right about the shortage of customers, but wrong that nothing would be going on at the plant centre.  It turns out that we are going to have the tea room for this season, and the builders start on Monday, moving the radiators and making a couple of extra windows.  When I arrived for work on Saturday the shop was in a state of flux, with the display cabinets in random groups around the room as if they'd been caught up in an ocean current, then stranded.  I had a choice of tasks for the day, to clean up dead leaves in the polytunnels (guessed that one right) or help rearrange the furniture in the shop.  I don’t rate my skills as a shop designer particularly highly, but it was very cold in the polytunnels, so I thought that as somebody who had done some shopping I would hunt for my inner Mary Portas, or at least make myself useful clearing debris and rejected shop fittings out of the way.

The owner had an idea that customers ought to be directed diagonally across the shop and back again, rather than being allowed to go straight to the till.  I expect this is based on sound retail theory, but most retailers aren’t dealing with shoppers who may have a metre or two of tree sticking out of the back of their trolley.  The width of the aisle required to allow customers with trees to negotiate the bend was so vast that we ended up losing about a third of the floor area of the shop to this gigantic runway.  Besides seeming wasteful and looking rather silly (not helped by the exposed acreage of concrete floor), this didn’t leave enough room for all of the display cabinets.

It became clear that various improvised structures made out of shabby tables and old packing cases swathed in black landscape fabric were going to have to go.  It was a pity about the picturesque wooden vintage port crate, but there was simply not enough space for the amount of furniture.  Two or three metal display racks, that seemed to occupy a volume out of all proportion to the quantity of goods they held, were evicted into the snow as well.  After some debate a large dovecote was moved outside, and we ended up with some wooden bookshelves, and the purpose built cabinets, which are quite nice ones with glass shelves.  My colleague, who has a really good eye for that sort of thing, hit on the notion of placing them on the diagonal instead of flat against the wall, and the whole layout began to come together.  The owner got her diagonal route into the gift area, but we kept a straight run from the door to the till as well.  She is still not fully reconciled to that, but she will be if she makes us get rid of it, after a few shelf-fulls of china have been swept to the ground by a passing tree.

We moved the cabinets that had been placed along the edge of what’s going to be the tea area.  Sitting next to a wall of glass shelving felt claustrophobic, and it’s going to be quite a tight squeeze fitting 10 tables and 40 chairs into that amount of floor space, which is the plan.  Putting shelves of bone china mugs and glass flower vases in range of people’s flailing arms and coat hems as they sit down to their tea seems to be asking for trouble, so I thought there should be not too much stuff there, and what there was should be non-breakable.  My new colleague, whose previous retail experience has given him a jaundiced view of humanity for one so young, added that it should be low value, since it would be easy for people sitting at their tables to slip things off the bottom shelf into their bags.  We compromised with a few cabinets, not too tall.

My colleagues managed to move all the display units with their contents still in place and without any of it falling out.  I don’t know how they did that.  It saved a lot of time, but meant that things ended up all over the place.  This morning I volunteered to rearrange, which the rest of today's shift agreed to.  I don’t normally clean and tidy my own house that much, so wiping glass shelves with windolene and arranging things on them nicely is not really my forte, but it seemed preferable to picking up leaves in the polytunnel (although first thing this morning it was only –3.5C and not –10.5C like it was yesterday).  The shop at work tends to go in for artistic displays, because various staff members like doing them, and believe that if the place looks attractive and eye-catching we will sell more.  I don’t regard shopping as a pleasurable leisure pursuit, so as I’d volunteered to sort out the muddle I did it my way, which was to make it efficient.  So I put all the bridge scoring sets together, and all the gift bags and tags on one shelf, and all the mugs in a china section.  My view is that if you want to buy a mug you would like to know that you have looked at all the mugs there are, ditto if you want to buy a bridge scoring set for a friend who likes playing bridge, and so on.  Mixed displays that combine napkins, greetings cards, candles, soap, a biscuit tin, a hand trowel and some raffia, all colour co-ordinated in carefully chosen shades of pink and green, are very good in moderation to add to the ambience, but not the way to present your entire stock.  I was commercial enough to put the toiletries in the middle where people would see them (and felt a glow of pride when this afternoon we sold a set of two sorts of handcream in a stand), and banish things that seemed out of season or never sell at the best of times to the edge of the room.

I’m sure that within a month it will all have been changed round, but the way that I did it was very rational.

Addendum  The supper was quite amusing and my apple crumbles arrived intact and did not turn to apple-flavoured quicksand during the drive to the hall.   The committee members were not even required to do the washing up, which came as a welcome surprise.